In addition to unleashing blasts of high-energy fire, ice, and electricity, an Embermage develops the means to magically interfere with the laws of time and space, moving themselves—or their enemies—across short distances in the blink of an eye.

This facility with applied magic defines the Embermage's combat role: an offensive spellcaster capable of delivering focused, precise attacks at a considerable distance, or of shifting foes violently away with short-range teleportation—usually with physically wrenching results for the targets! In battle, the Embermage wields each aspect of the Ember like a duelist wielding a blade—switching from fire to ice to lightning and back again in the span of a few heartbeats—all while disappearing from their foe's sight and reappearing in another, more advantageous position!

Zombie Dust sounds like fun. It's a DoT (damage over time) effect, and if you kill the targets while they're infected, they become your zombies (up to 5 at one time).

Really devoted fan site staff there. Makes me wistful about when I was running a Darkstone fan site (Delphine's attempt at a 3-D Diablo), "The Shadow's Darkstone Tomb" around 1998 to 2000 or so. I remember exchanging some e-mails with Delphine devs (good English, for French guys) and their publisher. Prima Games (strategy guides maker) even gave my site an endorsement of sorts, and sent me a bunch of official Darkstone strategy guides (to give away, though I didn't find a way to do that). And... oh well. Those were the days. I think it's more fun to just be eager for a good hack'n'slash.

There are very few skills with long (>2 second) cooldowns. We govern skill use mostly with mana costs and a new 'charge' dynamic we are working with. But we should get timers in for those that do have cooldowns. Just not in yet.

ii) Would there be a aggro meter?

Nope. I recognize the value of such systems but they're complex and don't seem to be necessary with the current flow of the game. Monsters do have the ability to target characters only, or even specific classes with specific skills. And there are a fair amount of crowd-control and 'awareness' management skills you can use to stop being the target. Tank-y characters can use many of the current skills to attract most of the aggro as needed.

iii)Would there be any in-game cinematics?

Absolutely. Don't want to spoil anything yet, though.

iv) Is Act 3 completed from a developer point of view ?

Absolutely not. But neither is Act 1 or 2. Everything is always in flux. We have the vast majority of the assets completed, though.

V) Would pets have talent trees or mere spells and abilities ? Is it possible to trade or exchange or keep more than 1 pet ? Can pets be dropped from mobs or bought from a vendor ?

We have lots of ideas for pets along these lines but limited time. Like everything else, though, we want to improve the system over TL1, so expect at least something new.

Max Schaefer, creator of Diablo and Torchlight, is forced to play as a barbarian in a Live Action Role Play. This documentary of the game shows him killing Diablo himself (using a torch). This is the short version of the video.

That's kind of surprising given that they haven't been doing any of the usual marketing, previews, interviews, videos, etc. Usually there is at least a 6 month run-up to a game being released, but maybe they're just counting on word of mouth working for them again.

Besides, you're all playing Skyrim right now anyway, aren't you? Or Battlefield 3? Or Uncharted 3? Or Saints Row 3? Or Arkham City? Or Skyward Sword? Or Minecraft? Or Modern Warfare 3? Or Dark Souls? Or Assassin's Creed Revelations?

If they're holding for a better release window, it's not going to get any better when SWTOR, Diablo 3, Guild Wars 2 and what have you get out the door. Although I'm all for "when it's done" being the release date. It's just, by February or March or whatever, most of us fans might be too wrapped in other RPG-ish games to care.

I assume the "we made a good run" at getting it out this year means it won't be out until early 2012, which is when Diablo 3 is supposed to come out. I can't imagine a worse time to release it.

As someone drenched in the D3 public beta (I'm sharing as much as I can in the other thread here), I can say Runic has its work cut out for them.

But hey, I love all hack'n'slashes done well and I totally expect to get this no matter when it comes out. I just think it would be better for Runic to either beat D3 to release, or at least to avoid coming out the same month.

Although heck, this will be $20 and D3 will probably be $50. Torchlight 2 will let you play offline, but won't have a battle.net-type secure option. So maybe a direct comparison isn't truly all that valid. It just depends on how much frantic clicking one's mouse hand/wrist/elbow can withstand in one gaming season! ==============Oops! And after Travis' update, they posted a Podcast (audio) Q&A:http://www.torchlight2game.com/news/2011/11/18/community-qa-podcast/*I'll see if there's a transcript somewhere.

A couple of the ways you are more like Diablo 2 is you still have stat points and you still have skill points as opposed to auto-stats in Diablo 3. So what is the benefit in your opinion of having stats points?

There’s always the problem that roles will dead-end themselves with stat point investment. But I think for it to be rewarding there has to be a chance for it to be not as rewarding, sometime things should occasionally go wrong. And one of the reasons I think that worked so well in Diablo 2 in that it’s such a fast game. You get through the game relatively quickly so if you make a mistake you can try again.

We want people to make alternate characters that have a unique flavour and are thought of as unique characters and there was a set of decisions that resulted in a character. I like to have an identity for a character and it’s not something we want to steer away from.

We have attempted in this stat system to make dead-ends less perilous. We have tried to give each of these stats more utility for every class and every character you want to make and hopefully we have succeeded with that. We do like to give you choices.And the same thing with the skill points?

Right.

And the skill trees, there’s no pre-requisites?

There are currently no pre-requisites, but we can support them, there are level requirements. We have tried to keep people from having to take skill they don’t want in order to get other skills. There are no explicit synergies, there are skills that play off one another in that it provides benefits to another skill and can be used in conjunction, but no synergies like they existed in Diablo 2.

Do you have skills that are obvious upgrades?

We usually don’t have skills that are just bigger and better versions of a previous skill. We want all the skills to feel unique. We would rather have a skill that got more visually and physically more potent as you put skill points into it.

We try to make the skills viable for a long period of time; a lot of our skills incorporate DPS to help retain viability

One of the inherent problems is that you have a lot of skills and you want them to feel very powerful and very useful and if you succeed in making them powerful and useful a lot of players can just use that skill and have fun using that skill and I think to a certain extent we have to come to terms with that in the normal game. Ideally for people who are more hardcore players playing at higher difficulties, there’s more advantage to combining those skills because you are overcoming more difficult threats.

Quote

So what is the charge mechanic?

Each class has a charge mechanic that’s specific to them. So for instance the Berserker accrues charge with melee attacks and once they have maxed out their charge bar they’ll go into an overdrive state where every attack is an instant critical hit.

The Engineer is different, he accrues charge through physical attacks and the charges are tied in more closely to the skill system so that skill gets physically more potent. So not only do you have cost for your skill, you have a separate mechanic that increases the potency of skills.

How often does the charge fill up in regular gameplay?

It’s relatively brisk, part of the function is to encourage you to stay in combat as it depletes after you have been inactive. Ideally it’s not more than 30 or 40 seconds.

How long will the benefit last?

It varies from class to class and there’s skill that can modify how long it can last or how fast you accrue charge or how much is depleted when you are using it.

MS: We really want to it to be soon, rather than the middle of the year. But we don’t want to be pressured by a date because the release really should be based on when we’re happy with the game and not because we made a commitment to a date.

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"Why did the chicken cross the Mobius strip? To get to the same side." - The Big Bang Theory

MS: We really want to it to be soon, rather than the middle of the year. But we don’t want to be pressured by a date because the release really should be based on when we’re happy with the game and not because we made a commitment to a date.

Interesting. They also cite sales figures (keeping in mind it was a $20 game):

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GB: So Runic Games as a business unit is profitable?

MS: Yes, absolutely. We’ve sold 1.1 or 1.2 million copies of Torchlight I. And we don’t spend a lot. Part of our business model here is that we run a very lean efficient operation. We have a total of 31 employees.

MS: Yes, absolutely. We’ve sold 1.1 or 1.2 million copies of Torchlight I. And we don’t spend a lot. Part of our business model here is that we run a very lean efficient operation. We have a total of 31 employees.

To be fair, I'm sure a lot of those copies weren't sold at full price since it was on sale on Steam frequently. Still, even if they averaged $10 a copy that is decent funding for a small company.

MS: Yes, absolutely. We’ve sold 1.1 or 1.2 million copies of Torchlight I. And we don’t spend a lot. Part of our business model here is that we run a very lean efficient operation. We have a total of 31 employees.

To be fair, I'm sure a lot of those copies weren't sold at full price since it was on sale on Steam frequently. Still, even if they averaged $10 a copy that is decent funding for a small company.

They talked about that in the interview too --

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GB: What has the average sales price for Torchlight I been? It started out at $20, but you’ve priced it more aggressively during several Steam sales.

MS: The sales are incredible on Steam, even to this day. We just had a holiday sale that was 20 months after the release of Torchlight and we probably had 25,000 – 30,000 units on a weekend. Average sale price I’m not sure, but it’s probably hovering around 10, 12 dollars.

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"Why did the chicken cross the Mobius strip? To get to the same side." - The Big Bang Theory

I loved the Hellgate Q&A -- I think it's the most concise description of "what the hell happened?"

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GB: What were the key lessons you learned from the failure of Flagship Studios?

MS: Boy, there’s so many (laughs). I think we made the mistake at Flagship of trying to do too many things and please too many people. The biggest lesson coming out of that was to focus on what you do well, have a very distinct specific idea and pursue it instead of trying to please everybody on the planet.

At Flagship with Hellgate London we had a free-to-play model, we had a subscription model… it was definitely a situation where we were trying to do too many things, too many models wedged into one game. It was a project that required a lot more time and assets than we were able to give it.

Another mistake we made was to have multiple partners for the game, so we had an US and Europe partner and an Asian partner. They had different interests and they also had their own financial issues that were going on, and we had to release the game too early. It needed another 9 months basically of polish and bug fixing and all that sort of stuff.

But we didn’t have the partners to deal with it and didn’t have the money internally to deal with it, and we were too stubborn to simplify our design and simplify our goals. Even though things were crumbling around us we just tried to forge ahead and do it, come hell or high water, and it blew up on us.

Coming out of Blizzard you get this sense that if you just work really hard it all comes together and works in the end, and it’s definitely not true. So we learned a lot of lessons from that and were determined to not repeat those. And that’s why we want to keep a small team that has a burn rate that’s rational. You can see our office is not extravagantly decorated in any sense…

People like to just oversimplify it as "Flagship was screwed up" or "Bill Roper was out of control," when it really sounds like it was just a completely screwed up and financially suicidal business plan from Day 1.

In retrospect, maybe the only chance Flagship had of surviving was canceling Hellgate before it got so far in development and putting the resources left into the more modest Mythos. Maybe that would've ended up morphing into Torchlight.

I do find it interesting that Runic is now in the same stable as Cryptic (under Asia-based Perfect World).

designing a non mmo game and pricing it as a mmo game was their downfall.

that and the game sucked complete ass.

I had quite a bit of fun with it once it was patched to death, and some people still play it to this day offline (not me, I seem to recall gleefully running the disc through a paper/CD shredder ). I tend to think of the game as one with a few good to great ideas wrapped in some really bad ones.

I also tend to wonder what would've happened if the Blizzard North guys hadn't gotten so impatient with waiting for Blizzard's ownership situation to resolve itself, and had ended up doing a Diablo III that we all probably would've played about 3 years ago. Would be nice to wormhole into some alternate reality and see how that turned out.

But hey, this is the Torchlight 2 thread, and sorry to digress.

I really do think it's possible Torchlight 2, Diablo III and Guild Wars 2 all come out around the same time this year. Gamers' paradise, publishers' heartburn.

Coming out of Blizzard you get this sense that if you just work really hard it all comes together and works in the end, and it’s definitely not true. So we learned a lot of lessons from that and were determined to not repeat those.

I think that's a testament to the leadership at Blizzard. It's too bad he had to realize that through a painful, firsthand experience. The subtle impact of good leadership can make a world of difference.

It sounds like Runic has their s**t together, and is doing it right. I'm happy to hear they've had good success with Torchlight. Partly because it's a fun game, but mostly because I'd like to see the pricepoint of $10-20 be proven to be more profitable than the $59.99 model in the long run.

designing a non mmo game and pricing it as a mmo game was their downfall.

that and the game sucked complete ass.

To each his own, personally I loved it, warts and all. To this day no other game has captured (for me) the feel of FPS mashed up with Diablo. Borderlands was very close but not quite there.

I still think the stupidest thing they did was ignore the clear negativity on the sub model, many in alpha/beta were complaining but they seemed to put on their rose-covered glasses and only read the positive fanboy stuff. Other stupid thing was trying to do a worldwide release in multiple languages when they clearly did not have the resources for that scale of a release.

Which does beg the question, not to get too OT, but how much freaking money does Blizzard have anyway? It's hard to imagine any company being able to have so many employees working full time without new product being delivered. For all their talk of releasing "when it's done" everyone knows it's BS - if they ran out of money they would release tomorrow, they'd have no choice. I guess WoW is just a monsterous cash cow that everyone feeds on? Or Mitt Romney is funding them?

Which does beg the question, not to get too OT, but how much freaking money does Blizzard have anyway? It's hard to imagine any company being able to have so many employees working full time without new product being delivered. For all their talk of releasing "when it's done" everyone knows it's BS - if they ran out of money they would release tomorrow, they'd have no choice. I guess WoW is just a monsterous cash cow that everyone feeds on? Or Mitt Romney is funding them?

World of Warcraft.

10,000,000 players @ $15 mo = $150,000,000. Per month. They have more money than God. I realize my math may be slightly off but it's illustrative at least.

EDIT:

10,300,000 subscribers as of Sept, 2011 @ 14.99 (1 month) to 12.99 (6 months) = $133,797,000 to $154,387,000 (Recalculated using the most recent data I could find.)

Torchlight II: Beserker Frenzy video (YouTube vid)*Note: A Runic guy at forums noted that the slo-mo effect in the video is just for show and the game itself doesn't do slo-mo as part of the Charge stuff.

This Friday we are talking a little bit about a neat new mechanic in Torchlight II: the charge bar! As you damage enemies, the charge bar will fill up, and you can use this to give your character an advantage when in the thick of combat. Time spent not fighting will cause the charge bar to empty, so you will need to keep an eye on things to keep your edge. Each class uses the charge bar in their own way, so take a look!

Want to see the charge bar in action for yourself? Come by the NVIDIA PC Area at PAX East this weekend (April 6-8), play Torchlight II, and ask Max and Wonder questions about development!

Engineer Charge BarThe Engineer's weapons and armor can only channel so much Ember before the pressure reaches a critical level. When charged, the Engineer can vent some or all of this excess Ember energy in the form of potent attacks!

Berserker Charge BarA Berserker's fury builds until flesh and bone can no longer contain it! Once fully charged, the Berserker's rage converts all successful attacks into devastating critical hits, and few opponents can stand in their way.

Outlander Charge BarAn Outlander's fighting style builds in speed and precision until it reaches a fever pitch. While charged, the Outlander becomes a whirling dynamo, moving faster and faster and striking where it hurts the most!

Embermage Charge BarThe Embermage's power stems from control, and control requires concentration. When fully charged, the Embermage enters a trance-like state of total focus, effortlessly unleashing powerful torrents of pure magic!

I assume because they're using the same publisher as Cryptic's new owner (Perfect World Entertainment), they've tied in pre-orders to an opportunity to participate in Cryptic's Neverwinter closed beta.

I just wish they had a ballpark idea on release date. I don't think my aging wrists/fingers can handle this and D3 simultaneously.

This is giving me a pleasant flashback to the late 1990s between Diablo and Diablo II (2000) when the market glutted with Diablo wannabes ranging from terrible to pretty good to mediocre and in between (Nox, Darkstone, Throne of Darkness, to name a few). If Grim Dawn can get a release, it'll feel like 1998-1999 all over again.

Post D2 brought a few others like Sacred 1&2, Divine Divinity, Silverfall etc. But I remember those pre-D2 Diablo wannabes -- maybe cause they didn't have to meet D2's standards/expectations -- with a bit more nostalgia.